The story goes that the photos were found in a Venice (California?) alleyway, discarded as trash, then picked up and cataloged online. Judging from the selection of 178 photos that found their way online, there's a lot of material here. The photos are primarily the work of James J. Kriegsmann, who started out as the Cotton Club's house photographer, taking publicity photos of many jazz greats. In his later work, Kriegsmann photographed the less famous among us -- for example, he was the photographer for New York's Miss Subways contest. Most (okay, maybe all) of the photographs in the Kriegsmann Files are of unknowns, many of which display a heartfelt earnestness that apparently didn't translate into commercial success. Check out, for example: Moonfast, Silverlight, Nbuda Funkshun, Fairchild, Amerasia, and Lee Noble.

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Also on Mental Floss:

DID YOU KNOW? Marlon Brando hated memorizing lines so much that he posted cue cards everywhere to help him get through scenes.
He even asked for lines to be written on an actress's posterior. (That request was denied.)